Constraints on ontology changing complexation processes: Evidence from event-related brain potentials

Abstract

This paper investigates complex anaphoric reference (i.e., when an anaphor refers to a propositionally structured referent). Complex anaphors (e.g., this process, this event) differ in their ontological feature setup, and the ontological type assigned to a referent can change due to the lexical meaning of the complex anaphor. Previous research has proposed that such changes have to comply with an ontological ‘abstractness constraint’ restricting the direction of ontological change. We present an event-related potential study that provides evidence that violations of the abstractness constraint result in processing costs. The data reveal that violating this constraint by shifting the referent towards a less abstract ontological type elicits an enhanced N400, while reduction of ontological features towards a more abstract type exerts no extra processing demands. The data indicate that the abstractness constraint affects real-time sentence comprehension and that different ontological types are implicationally related.